One of the finest teachers I’ve ever known asked his high school class to list the differences between men and women. We made a two-column chart on the board, and when everyone felt that we’d listed enough stuff, then it was time to eliminate the unnecessary bits. You know: emotions, sports, inability to ask for directions on a road-trip, that sort of thing. What we had left in the end looked something like this:

Well don’t that just beat all?

So where’d all the sexual deviance crap, reciprocal backbiting (ehem), and gender identity issues creep in and send us screaming to hell in a hand-basket? Ever consider how even our most personal perceptions, things that only we can really know about ourselves, are manufactured by the nebulous entity known as society for the means of social control? Ah yes, the virtue of utility: it you put it in the right sort of—ehm, box—and keep a lid on it, it won’t jump out and bite you in the ass. For a while, at least.

I’ve heard it argued that the idea of being ‘gay’ in terms of gender identity didn’t really come about until the late Victorian period and those post-Wildean days. Long before Oscar, of course, there were Greeks. But they weren’t fags or sodomites; they were just Greeks.

And before 1700 in France, gender identity, it seems, was a much more fluid thing than it is today. Same-sex relations between servants, for example, or young noble-folk, were sometimes a means of enjoying sexual pleasure without fear of producing unwanted pregnancy. Only as the eighteenth century wore on did the concept of four different gender identities develop: men, women, sodomites, and sapphists. Makes a person wonder about pre-packaged definitions: who started telling us we had to be exclusively straight, gay, lesbian, or bisexual?

The literature of smut in eighteenth century France was often didactic as well as stimulating; sexually explicit encounters were used to make social commentary and communicate lessons to the reader. In Mirabeau’s Hic-et-Haec (He-and-She), both male characters experimented with active and passive sexual roles, and a third, female character tried anal sex for the first time after her husband described to her the pleasures of being "socratized".

The literature of Pre-Revolutionary French ‘pornography’ was rife with characters that were open to possibility, that found fulfillment in discovering both the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ presence in themselves. Cycles of gender bending literature followed. During periods of social upheaval such as the Revolution, for example, the metaphor of a woman on top signified disorder. Later, in the 1830s and 1840s, portrayals of what we now call bisexual behavior symbolized the strife and confusion of the different classes as they moved toward a new social order. Socioeconomic struggle was implied, you see, rather than the actual celebration of alternate gender identities. One of the common insults hurled against Marie Antoinette during the Revolutionary years was that she was a sexual predator and tribade (read: lesbian in modern-day speak) who was completely insatiable. Gee whiz, in some circles nowadays it’d be bring it on, sistah!

I also frequently stumble in my readings across the old maxim in action: it is more blessed to give than to receive. Why is it that during periods of what one might dub rigid definition (for lack of a better term), the male partner sticking something into a receptive orifice is doing something acceptable; that is, his manhood is not called into question. But the partner who is being, uh, stuck, well… he’s passive, he’s feminine, he’s a woman. Indeed, even the masculinity of a nominally ‘straight’ male aggressor who "fucks someone up the ass"—literally or figuratively—is secure. And yet the negative connotation remains, especially for the human receptor. What kind of messed up shite is that??? (Damn, I choose the most unfortunate phrases.) It’s very interesting, though, how we’ve turned preferences, desires, and predilections into weapons to use against one another. We cling to an age-old patriarchal, phobic metaphor, as if sodomizing someone (ie. demasculinizing/making them a woman) is the absolute worst thing one could do to them. How can this be seen free of the politics of sexual, social, and economic power? Mon dieu—all this because of an organ and organs?

In Memnoch the Devil, Rice’s title character speaks of the horror of the angels when they saw God had separated humans into male and female beings. Tantric ritual unites the male and female principles to bring a closer connection to the Divine. In Hindu tradition, God—neither exclusively Male nor Female—is present in every living thing. What a construct, hmm? Lends a whole new meaning to namasthe (I greet the god presence in you).

As ever, spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch,

KAC

For further reading, see:

Merrick, Jeffrey, & Ragan, Bryant T. Homosexuality in Modern France. New York: Oxford University Press: 1996

(Review and partial summary of above: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/CLGH/CLGH1997-11-2-3davis.html)

Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe

The Gay Subculture in Early Eighteenth-Century London

Genders Online: